Performance

Employers can increase employee engagement by tying individual contributions to the company’s overall performance. Aligning people with purpose requires clarified expectations and a trusting relationship between the employee and supervisor. Traditional performance appraisals undermine this trust. Honest constructive feedback violates social norms according to the NeuroLeadership Institute. Feedback sounds like judging. Neither the giver nor the receiver is comfortable with judging. That is why people judge high, and judge nice. More than 400 large companies have removed ratings from their performance appraisal processes and have abandoned the traditional review of previous performance. There is a lot of convincing evidence that […]

Stanford’s Graduate School of Business’ five-year study of nearly 24,000 workers and almost 2,000 bosses resulted in 6 million measurements to determine the impact of management on productivity. Each worker averaged four managers a year to determine the outcomes from a good manager contrasted with a poor manager.  The findings revealed a 13% increase in productivity when replacing a poor manager with a good manager. Being a good manager is complex, requiring several skillsets and perhaps most of all is self- awareness.  According to a recent Gallup poll, 75% of respondents reported experiencing abusive behavior at work sometime in their […]

Peter Drucker identified a shift in work from muscle to mind in the late 1950’s which led to the term knowledge worker.  Many knowledge workers stay after work, arrive early or work at home to find time to think about what needs to be done, or give a project the deep thought it requires. One reason people are working outside of work hours is work hours are consumed by meetings. Meetings are necessary and effective when well run. Even when meetings are well run, too many or poorly timed meetings result in wasted time. In a typical meeting, three people […]